This has been happening to me a lot lately with UPS. It gives some sort of insight into how their tracking system works, and it’s odd enough I thought some of you might appreciate it.

I’ll get a tracking number from, say, Amazon, before the package information is entered into their system. Fair enough. Other services (USPS, and I think FedEx as well) will return a page stating that the tracking number has been issued but they don’t have the package yet. But this is what I get from UPS (with the tracking number blacked out):

The shipping date reflects my package’s shipping date, but the status, delivery date, signature, location, destination, service, and weight all correspond to a package which (presumably) previously used this same tracking number? (To wit, the delivery date is over a year before the shipping date.) Clicking on some links on that page gets me further tracking information about that previous package.

It seems as though they don’t actually delete tracking data–they merely overwrite it with new data as it comes in. They currently have only the shipping date of my package, so that’s the only part of that page which has been updated with my data. (Once they receive the package, all the remaining data is updated to reflect my package.)

This doesn’t seem like the right thing to do–they should clear out all the previous data once the tracking number is reissued. It doesn’t really matter, but I do get some information about some arbitrary package from about a year ago, and it could be potentially confusing. More importantly, it’s just kind of weird, and it’s happened to me several times recently.